“What Are You Going To Do About It?”: Mitt Romney And His Despicable Race Baiting Lies
Regular readers of Political Animal should find this analysis of Mitt Romney’s stretch-run strategy and message, as articulated by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times, very familiar:
The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.
Ads that accuse President Obama of gutting the work requirements enacted in the 1996 welfare reform legislation present the first theme. Ads alleging that Obama has taken $716 billion from Medicare — a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency — in order to provide health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor deliver the second. The ads are meant to work together, to mutually reinforce each other’s claims.
Edsall, as you may recall, has been suggesting for a good while that this is the sort of politics the Tea Party Movement is all about.
So that’s the most important sense in which the Romney campaign has finally surrendered unconditionally to the Right: not simply accepting its political positions or promising to make its priorities his own, or placing on his ticket their favorite politician–but also adopting its meta-message about the kind of people Obama represents (those people) and the kind of people who are suffering from his redistributionist ways.
It’s clear by now that the Romney campaign is going to shrug off the almost universal denunciation of his welfare ads (and to only a lesser extent, his Medicare ads that show a white senior frowning as the narrator says ObamaCare is “not for you”) as a pack of despicable, race-baiting lies–or use the so’s-your-old-man argument that Obama’s campaign tactics justify his own. If nothing else, his wizards probably figured out some time ago that the “welfare” crap offered a rare opportunity to hit notes equally effective with “the base” and the non-college educated white voters who make up a high percentage of this election’s “swing.” Add in the thick armor conservatives have built for themselves against any accusations of racism–now, almost by definition, they believe only liberals are racists, and only white people are targets of racism–and it was probably an easy call for Team Mitt, particularly since truthfulness is not a factor at all.
The Romney campaign’s attitude seems to be that of the famous nineteenth century rogue William (Boss) Tweed, who when confronted by journalists with his misdeeds, said: “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Romney’s not going to be shamed out of his unsavory tactics. But on the other hand, if his gambit fails, not only will his presidential ambitions perish once and for all, but just maybe the kind of politics he has come to exemplify–rich people encouraging the middle class to “kick down” at “those people”–will take a hit as well.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 27, 2012
“Giving Way To Angrier Politics”: Republican Convention Is Sign That Republican Grip On Sun Belt Is Loosening
For more than 50 years, the Sun Belt — the band of states that extends from Florida to California — has been the philosophical heart and electoral engine of the Republican Party. It was more than just a source of votes. The Sun Belt infused the Republican Party with a frontier spirit: the optimistic, free-ranging embrace of individualism and the disdain for big government and regulation.
From Richard M. Nixon through John McCain, a span of 48 years, every Republican presidential candidate save for Gerald R. Ford and Bob Dole has claimed ties to the Sun Belt. The last Republican president, George W. Bush, made a point of fixing his political compass in Texas once he was done with Yale and Harvard Business School, complete with what many heard as a slightly exaggerated drawl, as had his father, a Connecticut Yankee turned Texas oilman.
Yet as Republicans gather here this week, they are nominating for president a governor of Massachusetts who was born in Michigan and, for vice president, a congressman from Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Sun Belt states that were once reliable parts of the Republican electoral map are turning blue or have turned blue, like California. Only Southern notches of the belt remain. And the sunny symbol of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat cutting wood, as good an image of the Sun Belt spirit as there was, has given way to the angrier politics of the Tea Party, which embraces much of the same anti-government message but with a decidedly different tone.
The Sun Belt remains an economic, political and cultural force. But the 40th Republican National Convention is a sign that the Republicans’ grip on it is loosening. The nominations of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan could mark the end of an era.
“It’s really a dramatic change in the 30-some-odd years since I ran Reagan’s campaign,” said Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant. “I began with a base, even when we were 30 points down, when Reagan asked me to run his campaign. The West Coast is gone, and those are big numbers.” Stuart Spencer, another senior Reagan campaign adviser, said Reagan at once personified and defined himself as a creature of the Sun Belt. “That’s where we started, and we added from there,” he said. “But Colorado is in play now. Nevada is in play.”
How did this happen?
For one thing, the Republican who came riding in as the candidate of the Sun Belt — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas — stumbled. But there are larger forces at work that lead many analysts to think that a long-lasting shift is under way. The Sun Belt is in many ways not what it was when Barry Goldwater came on the scene. Once the very symbol of economic prosperity and untrammeled growth, it has been pummeled by the collapse of the housing market.
“There is a soaring rate of poverty in these new suburban regions,” said Lisa McGirr, a history professor at Harvard who studies the region. “I think it’s bound to have a political impact and to transform the ability of the Republican Party to appeal to suburbanites with private, individualistic solutions.”
More transformative is the demographic shift brought on by the influx of Latino voters. It is upending the political makeup of states like Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida. And it has come when the Republican Party has been identified with tough measures aimed at curbing immigration.
Many Republicans date the beginning of the decline to 1994, when Republicans in California backed a voter initiative, Proposition 187, to deny government services to immigrants in this country illegally. The law was eventually nullified by a federal court.
“Once California started alienating Latinos and once Latinos started moving in large numbers to Arizona and in Texas, that changes the whole game,” said Richard White, a professor of history at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford.
The change has been noted in places like Orange County, Calif., home to the Nixon presidential library and once a symbol of conservative political power and for many years overwhelmingly white. Today, it is filled with enclaves of Latinos and Asians — on many streets, it is hard to find an English-language sign on a store — and only about 43 percent of the voters are registered Republican.
Eventually, some say, even Texas might move to the Democratic column as more Latinos move in and vote. Even though Florida continues to vote Republican in statewide elections, indications are that the increasing presence of non-Cuban Hispanics could tilt the state leftward.
“The real question now in Florida is whether the I-4 corridor — between Daytona and Tampa — is becoming more Democratic than independent,” said Joseph Gaylord, a Republican consultant who lives there. “Texas and Florida offset California. And there’s no way a Republican can become president if you don’t win Texas and Florida.”
If the political allegiances of the Sun Belt are shifting, the changes in its political philosophy, represented by the increasing power of the Tea Party in states like this and Arizona, are slightly more nuanced. The view of government expressed by Tea Party members is not that different from what Reagan or Goldwater might have said.
But Mr. Spencer, the Reagan hand, believes that the Tea Party would never have embraced Reagan. “He was a pragmatist,” Mr. Spencer said. “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 13 times at least” in his years as governor and president.
It was Reagan whose election as president seemed to mark the coming of the political age of the Sun Belt, but also of what Kenneth M. Duberstein, the White House chief of staff for Reagan, referred to as “the lock”: the notion that the Republican Party could consider the Sun Belt in the political bank. As late as 2002, Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to George W. Bush, was arguing that California was fertile ground for Republicans.
“Reagan in many ways seemed to be the beginning of the wave, but in retrospect, it’s going to be remembered as the peak of the wave,” Mr. White said. He suggested that Mr. McCain’s defeat in 2008 might come to carry its own political symbolism.
“It’s always hard to say things based on one election, but he will probably be seen as the tail end of it,” Mr. White said.
By: Adam Nagourney, LA Bureau Chief, The New York Times, August 25, 2012
“Far Too Mysterious”: So Mitt Romney, What Do You Really Believe?
Too much about the Republican candidate for the presidency is far too mysterious.
When Mitt Romney was governor of liberal Massachusetts, he supported abortion, gun control, tackling climate change and a requirement that everyone should buy health insurance, backed up with generous subsidies for those who could not afford it. Now, as he prepares to fly to Tampa to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president on August 30th, he opposes all those things. A year ago he favored keeping income taxes at their current levels; now he wants to slash them for everybody, with the rate falling from 35 percent to 28 percent for the richest Americans.
All politicians flip-flop from time to time; but Mr. Romney could win an Olympic medal in it (see “Mitt Romney’s chances: The changing man”). And that is a pity, because this newspaper finds much to like in the history of this uncharismatic but dogged man, from his obvious business acumen to the way he worked across the political aisle as governor to get health reform passed and the state budget deficit down. We share many of his views about the excessive growth of regulation and of the state in general in America, and the effect that this has on investment, productivity and growth. After four years of soaring oratory and intermittent reforms, why not bring in a more businesslike figure who might start fixing the problems with America’s finances?
Details, details
But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper. The convention offers Mr. Romney his best chance to say what he really believes.
There are some areas where Mr. Romney has shuffled to the right unnecessarily. In America’s culture wars he has followed the Republican trend of adopting ever more socially conservative positions. He says he will appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court and back the existing federal Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA). This goes down well with southern evangelicals, less so with independent voters: witness the furor over one (rapidly disowned) Republican’s ludicrous remarks about abortion and “legitimate rape” (see “The Todd Akin affair: Grenades and stilettos”). But the powers of the federal government are limited in this area; DOMA has not stopped a few states introducing gay marriage and many more recognizing gay civil partnerships.
The damage done to a Romney presidency by his courting of the isolationist right in the primaries could prove more substantial. He has threatened to label China as a currency manipulator on the first day of his presidency. Even if it is unclear what would follow from that, risking a trade war with one of America’s largest trading partners when the recovery is so sickly seems especially mindless. Some of his anti-immigration policies won’t help, either. And his attempts to lure American Jews with near-racist talk about Arabs and belligerence against Iran could ill serve the interests of his country (and, for that matter, Israel’s).
Once again, it may be argued that this will not matter: previous presidents pandered to interest groups and embraced realpolitik in office. Besides, this election will be fought on the economy. This is where Manager Romney should be at his strongest. But he has yet to convince; sometimes, again, being needlessly extremist, more often evasive and vague.
In theory, Mr. Romney has a detailed 59-point economic plan. In practice, it ignores virtually all the difficult or interesting questions (indeed, “The Romney Programme for Economic Recovery, Growth and Jobs” is like “Fifty Shades of Grey” without the sex). Mr. Romney began by saying that he wanted to bring down the deficit; now he stresses lower tax rates. Both are admirable aims, but they could well be contradictory: So which is his primary objective? His running-mate, Paul Ryan, thinks the Republicans can lower tax rates without losing tax revenues, by closing loopholes. Again, a simpler tax system is a good idea, but no politician has yet dared to tackle the main exemptions. Unless Mr. Romney specifies which boondoggles to axe, this looks meaningless and risky.
On the spending side, Mr. Romney is promising both to slim Leviathan and to boost defense spending dramatically. So what is he going to cut? How is he going to trim the huge earned benefits programs? Which bits of Mr. Ryan’s scheme does he agree with? It is a little odd that the number two has a plan and his boss doesn’t. And it is all very well promising to repeal Barack Obama’s health-care plan and the equally gargantuan Dodd-Frank act on financial regulation, but what exactly will Mr. Romney replace them with—unless, of course, he thinks Wall Street was well-regulated before Lehman went bust?
Playing dumb is not an option
Mr. Romney may calculate that it is best to keep quiet: The faltering economy will drive voters towards him. It is more likely, however, that his evasiveness will erode his main competitive advantage. A businessman without a credible plan to fix a problem stops being a credible businessman. So does a businessman who tells you one thing at breakfast and the opposite at supper. Indeed, all this underlines the main doubt: Nobody knows who this strange man really is. It is half a decade since he ran something. Why won’t he talk about his business career openly? Why has he been so reluctant to disclose his tax returns? How can a leader change tack so often? Where does he really want to take the world’s most powerful country?
It is not too late for Mr. Romney to show America’s voters that he is a man who can lead his party rather than be led by it. But he has a lot of questions to answer in Tampa.
By: The Economist, Business Insider Contributor, August 25, 2012
“Passing And Punting On The Trail”: Mr. Thirteen Percent’s “Just Trust Me Campaign”
Mitt Romney, returning to New Hampshire on Monday with his new running mate, lasted only about 30 seconds before stumbling right into the issue that has dogged his candidacy like no other.
“Gosh, I feel like I’m almost a New Hampshire resident,” the winner of the state’s Republican primary told the crowd at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. “It would save me some tax dollars, I think.”
D’oh! Does Mr. Thirteen Percent really want to remind everybody how determined he is to keep his tax returns private?
Maybe so. The Republican standard-bearer seems to take a stubborn pride in his refusal to cough up details. My colleague Greg Sargent argues that Romney seems to be running a “just trust me” campaign that extends beyond 1040s and into the policy realm. It’s an intriguing observation, and so I kept an ear out for specifics as I listened to Romney and Paul Ryan hold their joint town hall meeting at Saint Anselm. Sure enough, they spoke and fielded questions for about an hour but deftly avoided detail.
“I’m going to do five things when I’m in Washington,” Romney announced. This was a promising start.
“Number one, we’re going to take advantage of our energy resources,” he offered. Excellent! Drilling? Pipelines? Nuclear? Romney did not say: Just trust him.
“Number two, I’m going to make sure that our schools are second to none,” Romney said. “We need our kids to have the skills to succeed. That’s number two,” he went on. Thus ended the education-policy segment of the program.
“Number three, I want trade that works for America,” Romney said. The closest he got to specifics here was to say he would “crack down on cheaters like China when they play on an unfair basis.”
“Go, Mitt!” somebody shouted.
Mitt did go — right to No. 4, to “show America that this team can put America on track to a balanced budget and stop the deficit spending.”
“Mitt, Mitt, Mitt, Mitt, Mitt!” the audience chanted.
He moved on to No. 5: reducing regulations. And here he had a specific, sort of: “I want to make sure that we get Obamacare out of the way and replace it with something which will help encourage job growth in this country.”
Replace it with . . . something?
Of course, Romney is hardly the first presidential candidate to avoid specific commitments and promises. His opponent, President Obama, was caught on a hot mike telling Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev to wait until after the election for a new Russia policy.
The difference with Obama, though, is he has already established a track record in office. By declining to put meat on the bones of his policy proposals, Romney wouldn’t have any mandate from the voters if he does defeat Obama. In policy speeches, he’s somewhat more specific than he is at typical campaign stops, but even then there’s nothing resembling a comprehensive plan for budget balancing, job creation or tax reform.
Romney and Ryan, in rolled-up sleeves and open collars, took the stage at Saint Anselm to the orchestral tune “Tryouts,” from the college-football film “Rudy.” This was appropriate, because the two men were about to pass and punt on issue after issue.
Ryan, the policy wonk of the pair, teased the crowd with the prospect of specific proposals (“We’re going to win this debate about Medicare!”) but then floated the idea of letting younger Americans, when they retire, “have a choice of guaranteed coverage options, including traditional Medicare.” That is a specific policy — but it hasn’t consistently been Ryan’s; he got the House last year to approve his plan phasing out traditional Medicare.
Still, that was apparently enough detail for one day. “I won’t go into all the things that we’re proposing to do to get jobs back, because I want to leave something for Mitt to talk about,” Ryan said. “The point is, we’re offering you solutions.”
Just trust them.
In fact, Romney didn’t furnish the promised proposals, and his foreign policy didn’t get much more elaborate than “American strength is critical.”
The audience members were friendly, but they wanted more details. His plan to reduce the debt?
“We want to grow this economy and cut federal spending.”
His tax plan? “I will not raise taxes on the American people.”
His Afghanistan plan? “Bring our men and women home, and do so in a way consistent with our mission.”
His plan to reduce student costs? “Make sure that when you graduate, you can get a job.”
Just trust him.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 20, 2012
“Limousine Jerks”: The Rise Of The “Drawbridge Republicans”
As Republicans head toward next week’s convention something extraordinary has come into view now that their ticket is complete.
Mitt Romney came from wealth and went on to build his own quarter-of-a-billion dollar fortune. Paul Ryan, who has never worked a day in the private sector (outside a few months in the family firm) reports a net worth of as much as $7 million, thanks to trusts and inheritances from his and his wife’s family.
Wealthy political candidates are nothing new, of course. But we’ve never had two wealthy candidates on a national ticket whose top priority is to reduce already low taxes on the well-to-do while raising taxes on everyone else — even as they propose to slash programs that serve the poor, or that (like college aid) create chances for the lowly born to rise.
Call them the Drawbridge Republicans. As the moniker implies, these are wealthy Republicans who have no qualms about pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Such sentiments used to be reserved for the political fringe. The most prominent example was Steve Forbes, whose twin obsessions during his vanity presidential runs in 1996 and 2000 — marginal tax rates and inflation — were precisely what you’d expect from an heir in a cocoon.
(In case you were wondering, Ronald Reagan wasn’t a Drawbridge because he entered office when marginal rates, at 70 percent, were truly damaging to the economy. But as GOP business leaders now tell me privately, the Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent, let alone today’s 35 percent, are hardly a barrier to work or investment).
Most rich Republicans who champion regressive tax plans find it necessary to at least pretend they’re doing something to help average folks. John McCain, who’s lived large for decades thanks to his wife’s inheritance, famously had trouble keeping track of how many homes he owned — but McCain also tried bravely to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. George W. Bush campaigned as a “compassionate conservative,” and touted education initiatives that made this claim plausible.
Today’s Drawbridge Republicans can’t be bothered. Yes, when their political back is to the wall — as Romney’s increasingly is — they’ll slap together a page of bullet points and dub it “a plan for the middle class.” But this is only under duress. The rest of the time they seem blissfully unaware of how off-key they sound. As the humorist Andy Borowitz tweeted the other day, “As a general matter, it’s a bad idea to talk about austerity if you just had a horse lose in the Olympics.”
Contrast conservative Prime Minister (and heir) David Cameron’s decision to defer his plans to lower the top 50 percent marginal rate in the UK. “When you’re taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions,” Cameron said, “you’ve got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you’re doing is fair and seen to be fair.” As his spokesman added: “We need to ask those with the broadest shoulders to contribute the most.”
Now that’s a conservative ruling class with a conscience! Can anyone imagine Romney and Ryan saying the same?
The interesting question concerns psychology. Drawbridge Republicans are flesh and blood human beings peddling indefensible priorities. How do they manage it and still feel good about themselves? One possibility is that they’re simply missing the genes for empathy and self-awareness. (Steve Forbes always did seem a bit like a bubble boy whose inheritance left him impervious).
But for today’s GOP ticket that explanation feels off. Romney, for all his awkwardness, campaigned and governed in a liberal state, and he enacted a pioneering universal health care law that’s helped many of modest means achieve health security. Ryan is equally mysterious — the boy-next-door who pays lip service to “upward mobility” yet seems to have no notion his plans would likely produce what liberal analyst Robert Greenstein calls “the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.”
My hunch is that extreme forms of rationalization and other defense mechanisms help Drawbridge Republicans cope with the cognitive dissonance. The growth of partisan media makes it easy to tune out disquieting dissenting views.
Whatever lies behind it, the rise of the Drawbridge Republicans makes the stakes of this election even higher. If Romney and Ryan actually win on their Drawbridge agenda, the United States will have crossed a scary new Rubicon for a supposedly advanced democracy. For years, whenever I’ve heard people criticize “limousine liberals,” I’ve always thought, well, at least that’s better than being a “limousine jerk.” Now it turns out that’s exactly what a Drawbridge Republican is.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 21, 2012
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